The House of Allerbrook

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by Valerie Anand


  The winter deepened. Just before Christmas, Stephen’s marriage took place and he and his bride were snowed up in Clicket Hall during Yuletide. Jane and Philippa, equally snowed up in Allerbrook, laughed about it.

  “No one will interrupt their honeymoon in this weather,” Philippa said. “Well, I wish them happiness. I like her.”

  Silvestra had turned out to be a good-tempered, firmly built, bouncy lady with a gurgle of a laugh and a gift for managing a household. Her two sons were both away, acquiring polish in an uncle’s home in London. Between the absence of the boys and the presence of the snow, Silvestra and Stephen would have every opportunity to build their own private world, uninterrupted.

  On the eighth day of February, 1587, Sir Francis Walsingham finally achieved what he had set out to do and Mary Stuart, formerly Queen of Scotland and pretender to the throne of England, laid her head upon a block in the great hall of Fotheringay Castle in Northamptonshire.

  She dressed for the occasion in red, the colour of blood but also the colour of martyrdom, declaring that she died a martyr for the Catholic faith. If at any point she thought of the men she had enchanted and dazzled and led to their deaths, it was only to regard them as fellow martyrs, and hope that they would all meet, crowned with gold, in heaven. Mary Stuart never had possessed more than a nodding acquaintance with reality.

  The news was proclaimed through England and, since the snow had gone by then, reached Allerbrook within two days. Philippa, for once breaking her silence on the subject of Robert, said savagely, “If he had been royalty, perhaps he could have died that way. The axe is swift. The rope was surely horrible, even without…the other.”

  “Try not to think too much about it,” said Jane awkwardly, and did not say how often, in her dreams, she saw Robert die all over again, and how often, in secret, she wept for him.

  The days lengthened. Spring came, and then summer. It was July when Jane noticed that Philippa had once more begun to go up to the ridge alone. When she had done so for four mornings in succession, Jane, ignoring the breathlessness which was now a serious affliction, plodded up the combe after her. She found her great-niece standing on top of the barrow, staring out toward the sea. “Philippa!”

  “Great-Aunt Jane! Did you follow me up here? I’m sorry. Does it worry you when I wander off?”

  “A little. What is it, Philippa? You were looking toward the sea! You…you don’t want to go back to the New World, do you? To your tribe?” Jane spoke hesitantly. She was more in tune with her great-niece than Blanche had been, probably because the link of blood between them was so much closer, but she had never been able to picture the world from which Philippa came.

  “No, not that,” Philippa said. “I belong here, Great-Aunt Jane, as I have said before. I’m sure of that.”

  “Then what is it? What makes you walk away from the house day after day, and come up here, whatever the weather?”

  “I don’t know, Great-Aunt. I want something but I don’t know what. I try to think of Robert but he’s slipping away from me, like a ship going out of sight over the horizon. I was watching a ship just now, doing just that. Great-Aunt Jane…”

  “Yes, my dear?”

  “I broke my promise.”

  “Which promise?”

  “The one I made to you when I said I would never invoke Wakonda, the great god of my people, again. I did invoke him, only a few minutes ago. I need help. How am I to make a life without Robert—a life for myself and a life for our children? I feel so lost. I tried to pray in the chapel, but there was nothing there. It’s different up here in the sun and the wind.”

  She made a sweeping gesture, taking in the rolling moors and the distant channel. “I can imagine Wakonda here! This barrow, where we’re standing—someone is buried here, so Robert told me once, perhaps the chief of a long-ago people who lived here, and they weren’t Christians, so he said. But I suppose they had gods of a sort and perhaps they were gods like those of the Algonquin. Gods of that kind would feel at home here.”

  “Philippa, you mustn’t…you mustn’t!”

  “Do you really, really believe in the God you worship?” Philippa asked suddenly.

  “No one has ever asked me that question before,” Jane said. “The answer is…I don’t know. Perhaps not. But we live in dangerous times. It’s wisest to do what everyone else does, worship as everyone else worships, and keep your own counsel. Philippa, when I look back, I see that a great deal, perhaps most, of my real life has been lived inside my head and my heart, in secret. For instance, you are the only person in the world who knows that once—and once only—I had a lover.”

  And no one at all knows, or ever will know, that if Robin one day inherits Allerbrook, it will be because Dr. Amyas Spenlove almost certainly forged the last paragraph of my brother’s will, so that Allerbrook became mine to hand on. The secret foundations of Allerbrook must remain secret, forever.

  Most unexpectedly, Philippa said, “Was his name Spenlove? Was he the man who painted that portrait up in the east gallery?”

  Jane laughed. “No. No, Dr. Spenlove was our chaplain and a fine artist, and I think, yes, that he understood me as well as anyone ever has, but he was not my lover. Just a very good friend.”

  “People can be both,” said Philippa, once more gazing out to sea. “Robert was.” She sighed. “Dear Robert. His only fault was that he was too honest. He wouldn’t pretend about what he believed. Must one pretend, in order to belong?”

  “Or to survive. Yes. Captain Clayman went away thinking I was just a grandmother who was too respectable and too doting, both at once, to believe that her grandson was trying to overthrow the queen! I did a good deal of pretending that day,” Jane said.

  “I want to survive—anyone would. But above all, I want to belong!” Philippa said it passionately. “And I want to belong here on the moor, to…to put down roots…. I must anyway, because Robin will have Allerbrook one day. Only, there’s more to it than just…just conforming. Something deeper. I know there is, but with Robert gone, I’m like a boat with no rudder. I can’t see where I’m going. I don’t know how to belong. I don’t know how!”

  “For the moment,” said Jane gently, “my advice is to conform in matters of religion, to recover from your grief and live from day to day. Your future will become clear. You’ll see. Now come back to the house. But once more, please promise me never to pray to your old gods again and this time, for your own safety, my poor Philippa, keep your word!”

  “I will try,” said Philippa forlornly.

  Alone in the study, later, Jane sat down to write a letter. Paul Snowe could carry it. She paused, struggling against a final surge of unwillingness. She didn’t want Philippa to go away, even though it would be a matter of only a few miles. It would be as though Robert had been buried twice.

  But she had never been able to shake off the feeling that she had failed Robert at the end. She had saved others in the past, but what use had she been to him? Or, looking back, to poor Harry Hudd, either. At least she now had a chance to make up for them both, to give Philippa the help she needed. Jane, listening to her as they stood on the barrow, had understood Philippa’s trouble better than the girl herself did.

  She understood because she, too, had loved but, since the day she’d watched the Pretty Doe sail out of Weymouth, had had to do without her lover. She had learned then that people deprived of their dearest wish, their dearest love, must still find a way to live.

  She had found one. She had given herself to Allerbrook and to the care of those around her, to whom she had dedicated herself already, in any case. Marriage would not have fitted with those duties and she had renounced all thought of it. But she had been older than Philippa. And she had a place where she really did belong.

  Philippa had no such place, no clear path before her feet. Peter Carew, the secret love whom Jane had never named, even to her great-niece, had unintentionally made it possible for her to see the true nature of Philippa’s sadness. Because
of him, she knew now what she must do.

  Curious, how much her two carefully guarded secrets, Spenlove’s forgery and her affair with Carew, had given to her.

  I want to belong…but I don’t know how. Jane knew how. Philippa needed a place in the world that was hers, and for her, that must mean husband and family and a home of her own.

  Gervase Wells, whose father was a prosperous farmer and a principal tenant of the Luttrells (which was nearly as good as being a landowner himself); Gervase Wells, whose home was only a few miles away, so that Robin would still be reared close to Allerbrook, his future inheritance; Gervase Wells, who had said he wished to be Philippa’s friend as well as her husband, was the obvious answer.

  Denied this opportunity, what would Philippa do but pine for the past and, very likely, despite her promises, turn again to her old gods? In that case, what lay ahead for her was nothing but unhappiness and, quite possibly, terrible danger. In a world where Jane Allerbrook wouldn’t always be there to defend her. The tiredness and breathlessness from which Jane so often suffered now were warning signs. How long before the last sand trickled out of her hourglass?

  She sat there for a long time, so still that she might have been the painted image of an Elizabethan lady, like her younger self in the portrait upstairs. She was even wearing similar colours, since her gown was a deep tawny, over a cream kirtle. They were her favourite shades.

  She had, too, a modest farthingale and a neat lawn ruff with a little gold thread in its edging. The latest generation of the La Plage family had grieved over her insistence that she did not care what the new fashions dictated. She had told them roundly that she didn’t want to push her head through the middle of a cart wheel, and her hips were large enough already without being expanded to elephantine proportions by a monster hoop. She knew very well that her old-fashioned moderation suited her.

  One could not sit immobile forever. Presently, her right hand began to move, dipping the quill, smoothing out the paper, tracing the words that needed to be written. The future stretched ahead and must be filled.

  To Gervase Wells, Foxwood Farm, at Dunster, from Mistress Jane Allerbrook of Allerbrook House.

  The time has come…

  ISBN: 978-1-4592-4843-4

  THE HOUSE OF ALLERBROOK

  Copyright © 2008 by Valerie Anand.

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, MIRA Books, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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